Shaping the Ripples (30 page)

Chapter Thirty Two

It was about six thirty when Katie arrived at my flat, carrying a bag of Chinese food. I’d spent most of the afternoon rehearsing what was going to say to her, but figured it could wait until after we’d eaten. It did strike me that there was a certain sick irony in the fact that she’d chosen to get Chinese. It meant we were replicating what we’d eaten on our first date together.

During the meal, we chatted pleasantly enough, with Katie telling me about the events of the day at work. It was a strange feeling to be an outsider of the life at the Centre. Once we’d finished eating and cleared up, Katie came up to give me a kiss. I responded briefly, but then gently moved back to look her in the eyes.

“We need to talk,” I said. Something flickered for an instant in her eyes – puzzlement, wariness, precognition – I couldn’t be sure, but she sat down facing me. I took a deep breath and tried to remember my prepared script.

“Katie,” I began. “I think you are the most wonderful and beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I love being with you.”

I paused for a moment. “Why do I have a horrible feeling that there’s going to be a but any second now?” Katie asked me.

“Probably because you’re great at reading people,” I admitted. “But I think we should stop seeing each other.”

Whatever she’d been expecting me to say, she clearly wasn’t ready for such a final statement. Her face momentarily displayed surprise and hurt, and I had to fight the strong impulse to take her in my arms and say that I was talking rubbish.

“Is this about last night?” she demanded. “Do you think that things are moving too fast?”

“No, it isn’t that at all,” I tried to reassure her. “Last night was the most special of my life. I’ve never felt so at one with another person. I suppose it did make me think about where our relationship was going though, and about whether I was being unfair to you.”

“You weren’t exactly twisting my arm,” she said. “I think that there’s something special developing between us as well. Why on earth would you want to stop that?”

This wasn’t going as smoothly as I’d hoped. “There are things about me that you don’t know,” I began. “Things that might make you feel differently about me.”

“I doubt it,” she said firmly. “Let me try three guesses. You really are a serial killer. You’re gay. You’ve already got three other wives hidden secretly away. Am I close?”

Despite myself, she managed to make me smile. “No, it’s not any of those,” I told her.

“Then I think we’ll probably manage to work our way through it,” she said with determination. “Whatever it is, I love the person you are now and we’ll cope.”

Her declaration that she loved me almost made me lose all composure, but I forced myself to stay firm. “It’s not just that anyway,” I said. “There’s a killer at large who seems to be determined to target everything that’s good in my life. Being together with you could be putting you in danger. I’ve already got enough guilt to carry without being responsible for that as well.”

“Don’t try and hide behind that,” she said, sounding angry for the first time. Her voice softened again. “Let’s at least be completely honest with each other Jack, OK? I know how scared you are about what the killer’s going to do next. But if he knows as much about you as he seems to, the he already knows about our relationship. You splitting up with me isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference unless you plan to take out full page adverts in the paper to tell the world about it.”

I had to nod at that point. She’d obviously been thinking a lot about this as well.

“If anything,” Katie continued. “You could argue that the more time we spend together the better, since it would make it harder for the killer to attack one of us.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “But you could equally argue that the more time we are together, the more certain it becomes that he’s going to decide to attack you.”

“Possibly. But that’s exactly my point. Whatever we do could be wrong, so let’s not pretend that it’s a reason to split up. This is just between you and me, and I think you owe me a full explanation. Shouldn’t it be up to me to decide if these dreadful “things I don’t know about you” mean we can’t be together?”

“I’ll try and explain,” I said finally. “But you’re not going to be able to change my mind about this. Do you remember the first time that you came here, you read a poem that I’d written?”

“The sad one?” she said instantly. “Of course I remember it.”

“Well, it was about me – about what I’m really like once you get past the surface,” I began, and went on to describe the abuse I had experienced, and the way that it had shaped and stunted my personality. When I’d finished, her eyes were damp.

“I knew it had to be something like that,” she said after a period of silence. “It wasn’t just the poem; there’s a sort of vulnerability about you that I sensed the first time we met. Rebecca picked up on it as well. It was probably that in the first place that made me feel drawn to you.”

“But that’s how it works,” I continued. “Liz was exactly the same at the start. Even though we didn’t know about the abuse then, she could sense something. She thought that she could love me enough to make it all alright, but that wasn’t how it worked out. I don’t want to end up hurting you in exactly the same way.”

“But you wouldn’t have to,” she argued. “You just said yourself that you didn’t know what the cause was. Now you do, we can deal with it together.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “When I saw the police psychiatrist the other day, he said I was incapable of feeling real emotions. I’m just a shell, but you deserve someone who will love you properly.”

“That’s rubbish. You can’t stand there and tell me that you don’t have feelings for me, because I know you’d be lying. Tell me truthfully that you aren’t beginning to love me and I’ll go.”

“I’m not beginning to love you,” I said. “I do love you. I love everything about you. But the sort of love that I’m capable of is only very shallow. You need something better than that, someone who isn’t so emotionally scarred and crippled.”

“That isn’t your decision to make,” she insisted. “You might have been hurt badly, but I love you as you are today. I’ve got my own past you know, my own scars and secrets. That’s what a relationship is all about, gradually learning more about each other and helping to heal the other person’s hurt.”

“And if the hurt doesn’t ever get healed?” I asked. “Then you’ve condemned yourself to being miserable until the relationship slowly bleeds to death. You’re too precious to me to let you take that chance.”

“That’s not your decision,” Katie shouted. “It’s mine. Do you think that chances like this come along around every corner? I believe you and I have something special – something that neither of us might be given again. And you want to throw it away just because it might not work out?”

“I just couldn’t bear to be responsible for hurting you,” I said.

“What do you think you are doing now?” she asked. “There aren’t any guarantees in love. It might not work out between us, you might get fed up of me, anything could happen. But surely it’s worth taking a chance, because it might just turn out that our love grows and lasts us a lifetime.”

“I don’t believe that I’m able to have that sort of love,” I said stubbornly. “The longer we’re together, the more you’re going to get hurt in the end. It’s better if we end it now, so you have a chance to find the person who’s right for you, instead of wasting your time on me.”

To my amazement, she gave me an enormous hug. “You are the right person, you idiot,” she murmured passionately. “But if you don’t believe that, then we really haven’t got a chance.”

She pulled away, and then carried on speaking. “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” she said with conviction. “if you want us to stop seeing each other, then we will. But I’m not ready to give up on you just yet. I’m going to wait for you to come to your senses and realise that you can’t manage without me.”

She had to stop for a moment to regain composure, as tears were rolling down her cheeks. I hated myself for putting her through this, but the stubborn voice in my head kept insisting “better now than later”.

“You’d better make your mind up soon though,” she added. “Because I’m not going to wait for ever. Just remember how much I love you. You might never be given another opportunity like this one.”

“Maybe I don’t deserve one,” I muttered, my head bowed to stop myself from breaking down.

She stood up and kissed me on the top of the head. “I know you’re upset and confused,” she said. “But I want you to think about one thing for me. Whoever this bastard who’s trying to destroy you is, he’s wasting his time isn’t he? You’re determined to do it all by yourself.”

I didn’t look up as she left. The only clue as to how she was really feeling came with the slam of the door behind her. I sat unable to move for what seemed like hours. Her final words echoing repeatedly in my head. Maybe she was right. Maybe my unwillingness to risk loving her was my final fulfilment of the belief that I had been born for Endless Night.

Right at that moment, I couldn’t escape from the feeling that I had damaged every life I had had contact with. I had made Liz unhappy, I was making Katie unhappy. Images of the tortured bodies of Jill and Sophie swam before my eyes, along with an unbearable weight of guilt.

The blackness settled upon me like a weight. The words “destroy yourself” played in my head as if they were on a repeating tape loop. I was suddenly struck with what seemed to be a brilliant insight. If the killer was choosing victims to get at me, then the process would have to end if I wasn’t around. If I were dead, then the game couldn’t continue. If my life had put people I cared about at risk, then maybe my death could set them free.

In that instant, it seemed like the obvious solution. I went into the kitchen, and found a sharp knife, only realising as I did that it was already dark outside. Back into the living room, I sat down in the armchair.

I rolled up the sleeve of my sweatshirt, to expose my right upper arm. Once more I pressed the sharp point against my pale flesh. This time though, I reasoned, my death wouldn’t just bring peace to me at last, it might save the lives of others. I pressed harder, feeling no pain as the skin parted under the coolness of the life. In the moonlight, the blood, which blossomed on my arm like a flower, was a rich black. “Press harder” the voice in my head willed.

But my arm seemed to be frozen in place. Katie’s words came fully back to me. “He’s wasting his time, isn’t he, because you’re determined to do it all by yourself.” What I was doing now was the final confirmation of what she had said.

Was I really ready to let him win so easily? To die without ever knowing who it was, or why they had chosen me to fixate on? I knew that the likely end of our strange dance was that he would kill me, but at least I might get the chance to look him in the eye and try and get him to face up to what he had done. The pressure on the knife eased slightly.

In any case, I told myself, it seemed rather foolish to commit suicide and leave all those who cared about me with the guilt of wondering whether they could have done something to stop me. Especially when there was someone who seemed so determined to do the job of ending my life for me. Now wasn’t the time, I decided and lifted the knife away from my wrist.

Now the sting of the cut made itself known. I went into the kitchen and rinsed the knife and the wound. It was still bleeding fairly heavily, so I found my first aid kit and slowly bandaged it up. This is the last time that I’m going to do this I told myself, but the words didn’t ring with much conviction.

It was going to be another long night.

Chapter Thirty Three

I woke up the next morning, determined to make some use of my spare time. I felt it was time I stopped waiting for something to happen and became a bit more proactive. The only problem was that I wasn’t really sure what I could do.

Then a thought came to me. I didn’t think that it was going to help me find the killer, but it might make sense of something else. I remembered Ian Jacob’s comment at his party about some scandal in Michael Palmer’s past which, when combined with Laura Smith’s recent warnings, made me curious. Maybe I could find out what that was all about.

At first I tried looking on the internet on my computer. A search for Michael Palmer returned far too many irrelevant replies. I managed to find a few newspaper sites which had archives you could search. The problem was that they were all very much under construction and most had so far only got the last year or so archived. After a couple of hours of searching, I had drawn a complete blank.

I wondered if I’d have better luck in the actual archive of a newspaper, so I looked up the address and number of the Yorkshire Evening Post. A phone call confirmed that they have an archive which has been “partly computerised” and is open to people doing research or study.

Half an hour later, having munched a sandwich on my way, I was at the offices of the paper. I told the receptionist that I was doing research for a paper on “The modern role of the police service in York”, which seemed to satisfy her. On her instruction, I sat down and waited for the archivist to come up and meet me.

After a number of people had hurried in and out, a small bespectacled man with thinning blonde hair approached me.

“Mr. Bailey?” he enquired and then, on receiving confirmation, extended his hand. “I’m Nigel Benson, I look after the archives here. I understand that you’re doing some research.”

He stopped and looked at me inquisitively. Clearly I had to convince him I was genuine before being allowed into the archives.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m doing a research paper on the way the demands on the police in York have changed over the last century. What I’d hoped to do today was to look back over reports for about the last five years, see what sort of cases they’d dealt with, reports on community relations and so on.”

“That sounds like a massive subject,” he commented.

“It is,” I agreed. “That’s why I thought I’d be better looking through newspaper reports to give me an independent flavour.”